Chipotle Mexican Grill is turning fresh produce into music with “From Ground to Sound,” an original song recorded inside Abbey Road Studios’ Studio Two using instruments made entirely from vegetables. The track transforms ingredients prepared in Chipotle restaurants every day into flutes, trumpets, percussion and bass instruments.
The song was created with the London Vegetable Orchestra, a five-member ensemble of classically trained musicians who specialize in building and performing with vegetable instruments. Corn became flutes, jalapeños were turned into trumpets, peppers and an avocado pit formed a horn, lettuce served as percussion and an onion became the bass.
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Creating the instruments was far more complicated than simply carving vegetables into recognizable shapes. Chipotle and the London Vegetable Orchestra spent three months experimenting with dozens of versions to find the right combinations of shape, texture and moisture for each ingredient. Because fresh produce constantly changes, the musicians had less than a day to assemble, tune, rehearse and record the instruments before they began to lose their ideal sound.
That unpredictability ultimately became part of the composition. Patrick Johns of the London Vegetable Orchestra explained that even two vegetables carved into identical instruments can produce different results. “Part of the craft is learning not to force an ingredient to sound a certain way but to find the sound that’s already there and build the music around it.”
The project builds directly on Chipotle’s focus on fresh ingredients. The company says it uses 53 real ingredients, with food prepared by hand every day in its restaurants, and the “From Ground to Sound” campaign uses those same ingredients as its musical building blocks.
“Real food has always been at the center of Chipotle,” said Fernando Machado, Chief Brand Officer at Chipotle. “So we took this principle in a completely new direction: creating our own signature sound.” Machado added that the goal was to make a track whose instruments, sound and story were inseparable from the brand itself.
Creative agency KIDS worked with Beacon Street Studios on the original composition, which was inspired by the journey of vegetables growing from seeds into nourishment. Icaro Doria, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at KIDS, said the idea came from looking at familiar ingredients from an unexpected perspective: “Very few have ever stopped to ask what they sound like.”
Fans can listen to the track on Spotify and Apple Music, while the accompanying film shows how the unusual instruments were created and performed.
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